A number of businesses relate to sales of structures, such as residential and commercial buildings, and land they stand upon. For example, the residential real estate market includes businesses whose customers are drawn from buyers and sellers of real property, as well as those who serve them, such as real estate agents, insurance agents, mortgage lenders, mortgage brokers, providers of moving products or services, painters, landscapers, and the like. These businesses have an interest in allocating their resources in an efficient and effective manner to many activities, such as for example, selecting retail locations, local advertising, direct mail marketing, and other parcel-specific and locale-specific marketing investments on the parcels most likely to generate the most business.
One problem in the known art is such businesses do not have any way with any measurable degree of precision or reliability, of predicting which parcels, if any, will be involved in a business transaction in the reasonably near future, that is, within a duration for which business planning is sensible. In the known art, similar problems exist for any businesses whose customers are drawn from households that are buying or selling a home, households changing occupancy in rented or leased units, businesses buying or selling real property, or businesses that desire to choose locations based in part on the relative volume of real estate transactions nearby.
Known methods include the subjective judgments of experienced professionals, such as (for example and without limitation) real estate agents and other professionals involved in the real estate industry who have been established in a geographic area for a considerable amount of time. Without detracting in any way from these subjective judgments, they are, at best, educated guesses.